New in the Art Library

This stunning exhibition unveils the remarkable art and historical legacy of two mysterious kingdoms of ancient China. Phoenix Kingdoms brings to life the distinctive Bronze Age cultures that flourished along the middle course of the Yangzi River in South Central China about 2,500 years ago. With over 150 objects on loan from five major Chinese museums, Phoenix Kingdoms explores the artistic and spiritual landscape of the southern borderland of the Zhou dynasty, featuring remarkable archaeological finds unearthed from aristocratic tombs of the phoenix-worshipping Zeng and Chu kingdoms.

This publication discusses the relationship between design and politics. By way of assertions such as 'design sexualises', 'design colonises' and 'design manipulates' a new perspective is cast on cola adverts, Sony Walkmans and the Le Corbusier chaise longue. The discussion about the political element of design is extended to the space of politics. Using the example of state receptions, electoral procedures and medal presentations the question as to whether political proceedings and forms of representation must be redesigned in order to improve our democracy.

The cult of saints, their relics, and devotion to their shrines is a phenomenon born in Late Antiquity that durably shaped medieval and modern practices across a broad geographical and cultural area spreading first throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. Tracing the medieval reliquary's "pre-history", this volume examines boxes bearing Christian images and patterns made between the fourth to the sixth century CE. It investigates how vessels adorned with images acquired meaning and power, exploring the dynamics of transformation that accompany both the creation of these objects and their long history of reuse, marginalization, and rediscovery.

A catalog raisonné of historical pieces of porcelain from China and Japan featuring photos and essays. When the famous Dutch art historian and connoisseur Frits Lugt (1884-1970) and his wife Jacoba Klever (1888-1969) decided to present their collections in the Hôtel Turgot in Paris, Chinese porcelain ranked among their priorities. They intended to give the French public an impression of Dutch Golden Age interiors, and a porcelain cabinet had traditionally been part of Dutch material culture. The result is a small but exquisite collection of high-quality Chinese porcelain from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries.

Largely known by the term "animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "Other".

There is ample evidence, from the earliest periods onwards, that mankind has sought to measure and organize temporal movement by means of intellectual theories about historical sequences and the contours of peoples' lives, as well as by practical literary instruments such as calendars, almanacs, and a variety of physical timekeeping devices such as sundials, astrolabes, flame-clocks, hour-glasses, and water-clocks. But in the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century, because of developments in physics and mechanics, it became possible to develop mechanical clocks, timekeeping machines independent of natural phenomena like the sun, moon, and stars, daylight and darkness. This book seeks to describe the impact of these instruments on the theological, philosophical, political, social, moral, and personal thinking of the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and the way that this thinking was expressed, mainly in English texts, but in other linguistic cultures too.

Lace has been a luxury item, sought after by royalty and the aristocracy, since the early 1600s. Fashion has traditionally driven lace production, and in the 17th and 18th centuries the lace trade was a significant contributor to the economies of many European countries. This exhibition catalog for a show at MoMu, the Antwerp fashion museum, focuses on the venerable tradition of lace-making in Flanders, but places it within the larger context of the history of lace from the 16th century to the present.